His plane ticket cost $500, but what was eventually spat out on the carousel would cost him four times that amount.
The 31-year-old architectural draftsman was traveling with his brother and sister-in-law, who had already collected their bags without a problem.
However, Glykidis waited.
The carousel was finally completely empty, and there were only the three of them; standing, watching, waiting.
Just as he was about to head to the Qantas lost baggage counter, Glykidis said his sister-in-law intervened.
“She was like, ‘Wait, there’s something going on out there right now.'”
But Glykidis did not flinch. He was a strange and unrecognizable object.
They waited and the thing came closer
“So she says, ‘Are you sure that’s not yours?’
“And I’m like, ‘Shit, that’s my stuff!'”
He said his stomach dropped.
The chewed-up remains of his luggage were “shoved into a plastic bag” and wrapped with orange Qantas-branded tape, he said.
“Honestly, it looked like it was fed to a pack of pit bulls or hyenas.”
Photos Glykidis shared with 9news.com.au showed her gray bag torn apart and catastrophically ripped open.
“When I got it home and unpacked it, my mom saw it and said, ‘Did they feed it to a pack of dogs or something?'”
In the nearly four weeks since then, Glykidis said he has been fighting Qantas to try to get $2,000 in reimbursement for his lost and damaged items, including clothing, boots and personal gear.
Qantas promptly paid $112 for the duffel bag, he said, but the airline has yet to approve his claim for the contents.
Glykidis is angry that Qantas required him to file a police report or legal statement as part of his claim.
“That’s implying that I have to prove I’m not lying,” he said.
He has tried to contact Qantas countless times, he said, spending a total of many hours on hold.
“It’s literally a merry-go-round.
“They keep saying, ‘We’ll escalate it, we’ll get back to you in 24 to 48 hours.'”
Glykidis said the experience had caused him great frustration and “unnecessary stress”.
He feels that Qantas has “run away” and left him to deal with the fallout.
9news.com.au has contacted Qantas several times for comment.
Today, the airline announced an underlying loss of $1.9 billion as its engineers launch an industrial action over a wage dispute.
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